source is not complete, is shown throughout the
whole story. The very form of action which self-love assumes in him,
tells that self though dominant is not yet supreme. It refers itself to
others. It absolutely requires human sympathy. So long as the man lives
to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,--so long
as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these
otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own _interests_,--we may
be quite sure he is not wholly lost. The difference between the two men
is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the
result of their wrong-doing. With each there is sorrow, but in Wybrow,
and still more vividly as we shall see in Tito Melema, it is the sorrow
of self-worship only. No thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an
obstacle and embarrassment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong,
can touch him. This sorrow is merely remorse, "the sorrow of the world
which worketh death." Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the
misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its
ascendancy. There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much
as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say
about him. All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is
concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be
arrested the irremediable loss to her. The wrong stands up before him in
its own nakedness as a wrong. This is repentance; and with repentance
restoration becomes possible and begins.

Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.
Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard
almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to
contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward
his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong;
savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that
wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any
true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet,
examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with
the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which
said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of
resentment" which modern sentimentalism